By Walt Hickey

Red One

The $250 million budgeted Christmas action movie Red One, which stars Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, made $34.1 million domestically and upped its overseas tally to $50 million, numbers that ordinarily would be bracing for a studio but in this case, it’s just Amazon going for a spin in cinemas ahead of adding this sucker to Prime, so, whatever. While the real story is Gladiator II throwing up the best numbers internationally for an R-rated movie in the history of Paramount, the Glicked phenomenon will be decided this weekend when both Gladiator II and Wicked are released domestically. Somewhat shocking stat, though: Evidently, Red One is the first actual Christmas movie released in theaters since The Grinch in 2018.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Apatosaurus

A 22-meter dinosaur skeleton sold for €6 million ($6.4 million) at the auction houses of Collin du Bocage and Barbarossa. While the business of selling fossils to wealthy buyers who may choose to remove them from public exhibition is very controversial, especially in the field of paleontology, in this case the issue will be sidestepped as the buyer has promised to lend it to a museum. The specimen itself, Vulcan, is about 150 million years old and composed of somewhere between 75 percent to 80 percent of its original bones, and was discovered in 2018 in Wyoming by an expedition financed by a French investor.

Agence France-Presse

A321XLR

For a while, there has been a gap in the market for commercial aircraft, as there isn’t a single-aisle airplane that can fly long distances — we’re talking 10- or 11-hour flights. Single-aisle aircraft tend to be designed for shorter hauls, and the long-distance flights tend to have considerably higher capacities. As airlines try to optimize for efficiency, this is actually a pretty significant gap, as there are lots of routes that would benefit from being served by a smaller aircraft rather than risking empty seats. Airbus thinks it’s got it solved with the A321XLR, which essentially adds an extra fuel tank to a version of the A321neo. The first was delivered to Iberia last month and the first long-haul flight — from Madrid to Boston — happened last Friday. Ordinarily, that would be a 292-passenger A330 aircraft, but now it’ll be an A321XLR with a maximum of 182 passengers, greatly saving on costs.

Ajay Awtaney, Skift

Inside the NBA

Inside the NBA, the chat show that essentially serves the same cultural purpose for straight men that The View does for everyone else, was feared to be dead after Warner Bros. Discovery lost out on NBA rights this year. While Turner Sports have been at legal loggerheads with the NBA over the rights snub, a deal has reportedly been cut, and Inside the NBA will air on ESPN and ABC as part of a settlement between WBD and the NBA. TNT Sports will continue to produce the show, the panel of Ernie Johnson Jr., Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Shaquille O’Neal will continue to remain with the program, it’ll air during key moments on the calendar, and in exchange, TNT Sports, Bleacher Report and House of Highlights get a global content license for NBA content for the next 11 years.

Joe Reedy, The Associated Press

Football

Ten weeks into the season and it’s more clear than ever that kickers are fundamentally changing the calculus of the game. So far, there have been 153 field goal attempts at least 50 yards in length, compared to 58 in the same period of 2004, and they now have a success rate in the ballpark of 75 percent. The success percentage for field goals under 40 yards is now borderline automatic, increasing from 89 percent in 2004 to 97 percent this season so far. While long field goals were the desperate acts of a team in the closing seconds of a half, now they’re just attempted for the hell of it; attempts of 55 yards or more have been made 52 times this season, and 37 of them happened before the two-minute warning.

Ben Blatt, The New York Times

Encore

A new analysis of concerts performed at 17 venues with long and storied histories found that the encore rose steadily over the course of the late 20th century but has fallen slightly in recent years. Based on data from Setlist.fm, the analysis was of 27,053 set lists from 1890 to 2024 which totaled 366,657 songs, and restricting the analysis to performances with at least 10 songs, an encore was a coin-flip proposition in the ’70s, happening in 52 percent of shows by 1978. Through the 1990s and 2000s, the rate rose steadily, hitting 57 percent in 2000, and then rising sharply to 76 percent by 2010. However, the tide is receding: In 2024, just 54 percent of shows had an encore in the set.

Chris Dalla Riva, Can’t Get Much Higher

Kitten

A study published in Nature describes a remarkable sabertooth specimen that was preserved for 37,000 years in the permafrost of Siberia, a carcass containing the head, forelimbs and front of a Homotherium latidens near the Badyarikha River. It is shockingly well preserved, covered in thick brown fur and whiskers, soft footpads, sharp claws and more. Based on its teeth, researchers estimate that it was roughly three weeks old when it died sometime 35,500 to 37,000 years ago.

Kermit Pattison, Science

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